In Cricket, Captains Wear Many Caps

England's captain, Alastair Cook, edged the ball during a match in July against India. As captain, Cook helped decide which players would play.

Philip Brown / Reuters

By SAM BORDEN

August 20, 2014

LONDON — One day last week, over the course of about an hour at the famed Oval cricket ground here, Alastair Cook looked at a weather report, examined the condition of the grass, decided whether his team would bat first or second, altered the positioning of some players in the field, made an inquiry with the umpire, gave a pep talk to an important cog in the team and, when necessary, stomped around near a few pigeons that were loitering in the middle of the action. (The pigeons duly flew away.)

In other words, it was a typical morning for the captain of a cricket team. It might have even been a bit light. Before all that happened, Cook helped decide which players would play in England’s Test match against India, formulated the team’s order of batsmen and bowlers and pored over a slew of tactical permutations.

For all the pomp that goes with a sports captaincy, most of the time the person holding the title has about as much responsibility as a student government vice president. In football, a captain’s main duty involves calling heads or tails. In soccer, the most noticeable feature of a captain is that he gets to wear a colorful armband. In baseball, many teams do not even have a captain.

Cricket is an outlier. In cricket, the captain is everything: coach, general manager, star player, team psychologist and, when it comes to leading the national team of a cricket-crazed nation such as England or India, full-on celebrity.

Cook holding the trophy after spurring England to a 3-1 series victory against India.

Philip Brown / Reuters

“To be captain of the national team is equivalent to being prime minister,” said Mihir Bose, an author who has written extensively on cricket.

The comparison is not so far-fetched. Much like politicians or heads of state, cricket captains are subject to examinations and analyses that often border on the hysterical. Cook’s latest plight is only the most recent example: Having taken over in August 2012, he was roundly praised when England beat Australia in 2013 in the Ashes, the competition generally regarded as the most important for England’s Test cricket team. (Test cricket is the most traditional form of the game and takes place over five days, during which play stretches for about seven hours each day. One-day matches and an even shorter format known as Twenty20 cricket are also played.)

That winter, however, England played Australia again and was beaten in five consecutive matches, a shellacking that was seen as humiliating. Cook’s performance as a batsman was lacking, too, so when India beat England at Lord’s Cricket Ground here in July, calls for Cook to resign his captaincy were rampant.

Kevin Pietersen, a former England captain whom Cook dismissed from the team not long after he took over, did not hold back in his criticism, saying Cook lacked “the tactical brain” to lead. Michael Vaughan, another former England captain, said Cook needed “to be taken away from the England captaincy” because his replacement “can’t be any worse.”

Cook responded by spurring England back to domination by the conclusion of the five-Test series with India (England won the series, 3-1). He acknowledged afterward that he pondered resigning — “It was only natural” — but said he now felt invigorated by the turn of fortune. The more recent results prompted many of his critics to suddenly hail him as a genius, although Vaughan said in an interview that he still thought Cook “could use a break” as captain.

“I think it would be good for England,” Vaughan said. “The job is just so demanding.”

That much is certainly true, and the hierarchy within cricket contributes to the overwhelming load. Most teams have a board of so-called selectors, typically including executives and former players, who are involved in picking the captain. In the majority of cases, the captain then works with the selectors on which players to use during a given match, which is the rough equivalent of a meeting between Cristiano Ronaldo and the Real Madrid board to discuss the weekend’s starting lineup. (That does not happen.)

Ed Smith, a former international cricketer who wrote a book, “Playing Hard Ball,” that compared cricket and baseball, said captains in cricket needed to be emotionally removed from their teammates because they frequently make decisions that directly affect the livelihoods of others.

Smith, who spent time as the captain of his county cricket team — top professional cricket leagues in England are organized by county instead of city — said he often had awkward moments after choosing his team “because you’d see a friend of yours and know that, if you don’t play them, the selectors are going to think you don’t need them around anymore.”

The best captains are often the best players (or at least one of the best), although that is not always true. Mike Brearley, who guided England in the late 1970s, is often cited as the country’s best captain even though he was not an elite player. Rather, Brearley, who has written one of many books on cricket captaincy, was known as a shrewd tactician as well as a superb people manager, alternately pumping up his players and, when necessary, dressing them down.

Cook, when his batting stroke is tuned, is an elite talent if not a sharp leader. On Friday, England essentially put a lock on the series with India when it scythed through the Indian lineup in less than a day. In Test cricket matches, labeled as such because they are said to be the purest test of a cricket team’s strength, each team bats twice. A team’s time at bat, known as an innings, ends when 10 of its 11 players have been bowled out (generally because one of their hits was caught on the fly or because they could not protect the wooden wicket behind them and the ball hit it).

Typically, a Test cricket team might be at bat for its first innings for a day and a half or more and might hope to score as many as 400 runs. On that opening day against England, however, India was bowled out in its first innings after about five hours. The Indians scored 148 runs — a paltry total that surely gave Cook’s confidence a boost.

During that day’s play, Cook — who generally plays at first slip, a position just behind and to the side of the batsman — had the perfect recipe of bowler changes and positioning switches. India’s captain, M. S. Dhoni, struggled to rally his team and said afterward that he could not figure out an order of batsmen to properly handle England’s strong bowlers.

Throughout the day, both Dhoni and Cook could be seen conferring with coaches — yes, cricket teams have coaches and even assistants — but there is, as Smith called it, a distinct “transfer of power” that takes place when a cricket captain walks on to the field. Coaches help with analysis and teaching during training, but on match days they are, in many ways, just interested spectators. The cricket captain — not the coach — is the boss once play begins.

“I remember when I was playing county cricket, just when I was starting, and the coach told me to go out and give the players water and give the captain a message about strategy,” Smith said. “He told me, ‘Make sure you tell the captain this is directly from me.’ ”

Smith laughed. “I got out there, told the captain the message and stressed that the coach said to tell him who it came from. The captain looked at me and said, ‘Tell him that he’s the coach and I’m the captain,’ ” Smith said, noting that there were also quite a few well-placed expletives.

“Then, just as I was about to go,” Smith added, “the captain said, ‘Oh, and be sure to tell him that this came directly from me.’ ”